painting of the month

Snow in New York -- Robert Henri, 1902 (National Gallery of Art)

art and ophelia

Ophelia, the tragic young beauty of Hamlet, has been painted many times in art, with the Pre-Raphaelites finding her particularly fascinating and John Everett Millais using Elizabeth Siddal as the model for his circa 1851 portrait. This required Lizzie to spend a great deal of time in a tub of water while posing for Millais and eventually caused her to catch a bad cold. Beyond that, Lizzie’s Ophelia costume was a second-hander, described by Millais in a letter as being "a really splendid lady's ancient dress--all flowered over in silver embroidery…You may imagine it is something rather good when I tell you it cost me, old and dirty as it is, four pounds."

Odilon Redon did some ethereal and haunting portraits of Ophelia, and two I haven’t seen as often as those of Waterhouse and Millais are late 19th century works by Scottish artist Frances MacDonald MacNair and French artist Paul Steck (pictured). Click here too for an article detailing more info about the plants and flowers in Ophelia’s famed garland and her “fair and unpolluted flesh.”

painting of the month

Large Dark Red Leaves on White -- Georgia O'Keeffe, 1925 (Phillips Collection)

kaffee and koloman

A recent visit to one of Julius Meinl’s coffeehouses brought to mind another Austrian who made the planet a more creative and interesting place: Koloman Moser. Moser was born in Vienna in 1868 and died in 1918, and throughout his varied career was a painter, graphic designer and printmaker who also worked with ceramics, tapestries, textiles, jewelry and stained glass. Moser was one of the driving forces behind the Wiener Werkstätte movement and was a founding member of the Vienna Secession with Gustav Klimt and various others. This Moser painting is from around 1913 and titled Waldwiese, which seems to translate to something like Forest Meadow in English.

precisely paul

Neo-Impressionist artist Paul Signac was born November 11, 1863 in Paris and during his career would help define the style of Pointillism—or precise and chromatic placements of paint to form smoothly arranged scenes. Another major Pointillist and colleague of Signac was of course Georges Seurat.

Signac was an avid sailor, and one of his boats was named Olympia, in honor of Manet’s scandalous nude painting of 1865. Signac’s portrait of his friend, art critic and visionary Felix Fénéon, was done in 1890, but it’s so progressively composed and uses such dynamic colors that it looks almost like a work by Peter Max or some major classic 1970s album cover.

Signac died in 1935 at the age of 72. Click here to see the beautiful range of his work and for more biographical information.

(Pictured: Portrait of Felix Fénéon [Against the Enamel of Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angels, Tones and Tones and Colours] -- Paul Signac, 1890)

taxi driver

When I drive cab
I am the hunter.
My prey leaps out from where it
hid, beguiling me with gestures

When I drive cab
all may command me, yet I am in command of all who do

When I drive cab
I am guided by voices descending from the naked air....

Taxi Suite, Lew Welch (1926-1971)

(Pictured: The City from Greenwich Village, 1922 -- John Sloan, National Gallery of Art)

louis rémy mignot

The son of French immigrants and Napoleon Bonapartists, Louis Rémy Mignot was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1831. After study at the Hague, he began to make a name for himself as a landscape painter, with a particularly notable work around that time being Sources of the Susquehanna, tracing the path of the mighty river. Mignot was elected a member of the National Academy of Design and headed off on an Ecuadorian expedition in 1857, and all seemed to be going well for him professionally—or at least until the tragedy of the American Civil War. Mignot had his studio in New York at the time, but he did not opt to publicly support the Union or the Confederacy. He went to London instead, befriending James McNeill Whistler and also trying to establish himself there with the same success that the expatriate Whistler had managed.

Mignot’s epic painting, an 1866 churning view of the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, was done during his London years. War again upset his plans in 1870 when he was forced to abruptly leave Paris—where he was then staying—upon the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian conflict. Mignot caught smallpox and died soon after at the age of thirty-nine, evidently unable to outmaneuver Fate and Death any longer. Niagara is at the Brooklyn Museum, and it really is a forgotten masterpiece that seems to be receiving more worthy attention lately.